The Archetype of the Femme Fatale in Romantic Art
[This is an essay written for my Dark Romantics course at the Evergreen State College that I think is far better written than anything I can do today. Something different from Enneagram content]
“In Gustave Moreau’s work, which in conception went far beyond the data supplied by the New Testament, Des Esseintes saw at last the weird and superhuman Salome he had dreamed of. Here she was no longer just the dancing girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who saps the morale and breaks the will of a King with the heaving of her breasts, the twitching of her belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old ice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs the flesh and steels her muscles, a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of Troy of the Classic fables, all who come near her, all who see her, all who touch her.”
-Joris-Karl Huysman, A Rebours (Against Nature).
In Romantic art, the femme fatale is a symbol for the psyche and the artist’s relation to it. She is alluring, beautiful, and the object of desire for which the artist is unable to turn away. It is that very quality, that power over the artist and her complete freedom to subject him or her to her whims, which are many, that makes her so dangerous. Throughout psychology, mythology, and in art, she takes many forms but is always recognizable as the siren who subjects men to her, to whom those enchanted by her are unable to turn away.
She is Eurydice beckoning Orpheus to follow her into the underworld, and she is the maenads who tear him apart; she is Salome demanding the head of Jokanaan, Electra calling like a chthonic voice of nature for Agamemnon’s revenge. She is even in the boy Tadzio of Death in Venice who beckons Aschenbach to his death. As in the quote above, the femme fatale exceeds the constraints and politics of gender and moves to the heart of the seductive and destructive power of beauty. But what is this symbol and why does it take the shape of a woman? What is her call, and why does she demand blood?
Woman symbolizes life and continuation, as all that is unfolds under the Egyptian sky goddess Nuit, within the boundaries of her womb. Within this sacred circle creation and destruction, form and chaos exist in constant renewed tension, giving rise to form as quickly as it is dissolved again in the nexus of potential – Dionysus. It is in woman that the complicated relationship between the forces of Apollo and Dionysus are most poignantly demonstrated.
Almost paradoxically, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, where the beautiful boy Tadzio takes on the role of femme fatale, clearly expresses this relationship. The story itself is the symbolic journey of the artist in pursuit of ideal beauty. Aschenbach, the artist, realizes his stagnancy and goes on vacation in Venice to renew himself artistically. There he comes upon Tadzio, who is the fullest expression of beauty Aschenbach has ever seen, and he becomes consumed by this boy. He is filled with artistic inspiration and undergoes deep transformations all the while being lead further and further away from himself in his pursuit, risking death on many fronts.
Tadzio, who is an Apollonian expression of beauty, actually leads Aschenbach into the Dionysian like Charon into Hades as he abandons himself, allowing himself to be taken over by the encroaching Dionysian forces. The pursuit of beauty demands the sacrifice of self-possession. One turns themselves to the mercy of their impulses and the unconscious, to move beyond concepts into a place that is likewise fertile with meanings and ripe with insanity. In the final scene, Tadzio is the single Apollonian form of beauty amidst the Dionysian, undifferentiated sea, beckoning Aschenbach, who is helpless to the pull, the desire and pursuit. Tadzio being a boy highlights the unattainable nature of a pursuit that can never be consummated, just as Eurydice can never be brought to the surface or Salome, in all her sexuality, can never be possessed.
Pursuit, focus, and drive are some of the primary characteristics of masculine energy, with the feminine generally being the object of this desire. Therefore Woman has become the symbol of beauty in their shared evocation of desire. Psychologist Carl Jung outlined the Anima as the primary anthropomorphic archetype of the unconscious mind in a male, with the Animus being the masculine equivalent within a female, which he described as the totality of the unconscious feminine psychological qualities that a male possesses, the unconscious itself, which manifests to the conscious mind as woman.
Jung characterized confronting one’s psychological shadow an “apprentice-piece”, while confronting one’s anima is the masterpiece and viewed the anima process as being one of the sources of creative ability, and likewise for a female’s confrontation with her animus. Her call literally brings one into their own depths and subjects one to forces that are capable of destroying one’s consciousness and bringing them to madness, just like beauty. Like a siren, beauty calls. Beauty is arresting, it breaks the patterns of systems consciousness imposes on the world to create order, like language.
Intrinsic to beauty is it’s very quality of being unnamable. One cannot really say exactly why something is beautiful, except that it conveys or makes meaning. This bestowing of meaning occurs because it eludes systematizing, language and reason. It is a gateway to what lies beyond our systems, it renews, re-energizes, and brings new intention to whatever beauty is found in. But what is beautiful betrays its own becoming, a sense of the thing existing beyond our frozen-in-a-moment experience of it, and therefore it contains death. It breaks the patterns consciousness imposes for its continued existence, its survival, so therefore to surrender oneself to beauty is to leave one vulnerable to deadly forces.
As every symbol also contains its opposite, the life woman represents also contains death. Life implies its own end. Death is the boundary that encircles life, and this boundary exists as a designation, a differentiation, and therefore highlights the significance of life by the distinction it represents. The myths recounted in Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony are accompanied by a reminder again and again that “life is excess”, with an excess implying an overtaking of a boundary and life implying the boundary of death and necessity. This constraint imposed by the net of Ananke creates distinction and expresses the becoming of what it encloses by the imposing death unto life, but it also, paradoxically, freezes and cuts off, like the ends of a canvas around a painting – in other words, it forms the image. The femme fatale demands blood.
Oscar Wilde’s Salome demands the head of Jokanaan the Prophet after being promised by Herod anything she wished in return for her Dance of the Seven Veils. Her story reveals another aspect to the femme fatale– not only does she act as one who calls and beckons, but she also has a destructive force that inflicts itself onto others. As in previous examples of the femme fatale, those who cannot help but gaze at her, and therefore desire her, are destroyed in some way or another. The Syrian dies, and Herod, upon Salome receiving the head of Jokanaan, orders the torches extinguished so that he may no longer see. But Jokanaan, the prophet from below who has been kept out of sight, refuses to return the gaze of Salome, triggering her infatuation and his eventual decapitation.
Jokanaan is the unconscious force hidden out of sight, kept underground, too powerful to possess and speaks words that are not his own, a language that is unbearable for all to hear but Salome. He is a pure channel to something beyond himself, unaffected by the events around him, qualities which Salome finds enchanting. His refusal to gaze is his siren’s call. Thus, the relationship between Salome and Jokanaan reveals a more sophisticated reading of the femme fatale – as the archetype is bestowed on both characters. Beautiful and seductive but deadly like the moon, Salome embodies the consuming and destructive forces of beauty, bringing destruction and chaos to those who attempt to possess her, but its beauty as the gateway to those deep Dionysian forces that encapsulates the story of Salome.
Salome as beauty seduces, enchants, and destroys. She beckons Jokanaan out from below, and she alone can bear to look upon him and hear his words, but for Salome to be brought to kiss Jokanaan, to have his head on a platter, she has to dance and do what beauty does best – enchants, it seduces, and creates the illusion that conceals its destructive intention – to bring one into new meaning by suspending one’s systematizing and agency and, as if my some means that secretly slip around consciousness, to introduce a taste of the Dionysian.
Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils is infused with the devouring aggression and possession of sex, lifting each of her own veils lifts the veil of Herod’s consciousness, who sits in place of all witnesses to beauty, until she is able to coax from him the means to bring about the kiss she bestows to Jokanaan’s head - that relationship is brought together by Salome’s momentary dissolution of Herod’s self-possession to the same effect as beauty. This kiss is key to the work of art. The head of Jokanaan is an image, the glimpse of the meaning-producing Dionysian in the work of art, a “frozen” slice that alludes to, but protects us from the expanse of the Dionysian.
In death, there is no gaze for Jokanaan to return to destroy us. His head represents his life, the entire unknown expanse of the Dionysian we can only infer, which lends itself to the sense of becoming that is necessary in a successful work of art. Just like Tadzio, Salome is the gatekeeper, beauty, to the wider expanse of the ground of being, the flux of becoming, that produces the spiritual sense of expansion at the risk of dissolution experienced in the work of art.
The femme fatale is the siren who is herself subject to the call of the Dionysian, acting as both its channel and its mesmerizing disguise, the vital illusion of beauty, that draws the artist in at risk to his or her own sanity.